Sleep.  Sleep is a wonderful thing.  Not that I don’t sleep during the semester, but it’s that exhausted sleep where you’re out until you wake up without an alarm.  I ended my day yesterday with an all school sing.  Oh sure it SOUNDS like fun if you get to sit and watch it happen, but the truth is it’s a ton of work.  Several weeks worth of work.  Not going into any more details here, but my music teacher colleagues understand that making something look easy is exhausting.  After that and our winter concert at the beginning of the week, sleep was the priority last night.

I’m not sure teachers outside of music understand this.  Their expectation seems to be that once a performance or sing-a-long is finished I should just kick back into teaching mode.  The truth is, chances are I’ve just finished having a 30 minute or so adrenaline rush that was preceded by several hours of anxiety of making sure everything is as it should be to make the kids successful, anxiety made more intense when I’m squeezed for time in terms of set up.  Am I the only one that feels that way?  It’s an incredible stressor for me and when it’s all over, I usually hit a wall, tinged with some frustration that I can’t get some help for a few minutes with a class I would normally have.  But I get it – after all, it’s only elementary kids.

I’m very fortunate that there are custodians at my schools who are super heroes, men and women who help tear down and set up, who listen to what I need and work hard to make it happen.  This doesn’t mean that I’m not also schlepping chairs, table, pianos, sound equipment, and moveable walls.  At my age, I feel it for a few days afterwards but I want to make sure things are where I want them and I want to be a team player with my other music colleagues, not the “girly girl”.  That’s the way colleagues should work together.  Not always sure my regular ed colleagues understand this, especially when they expect me to still take their kids while I do this.  Again, thank goodness for a wonderful student teacher who was able to take those kids for me.  I’m not always that lucky.

Yes, I chose this way of life.  That adrenaline rush I talked about can be the world’s greatest high.  There’s nothing like making some great music with my kids, but it’s also a hell of a lot of work.  I don’t have grad assistants or groupies.  For a sing-a-long I rehearse 500 5-11 year olds for several weeks to sing 30 minutes worth of music, some with movement, so that I can stand in front of them and hope they behave well enough to get through it all and be seen on Facebook Live by all of their parents and grandparents. No pressure there. What if classroom teachers had to do the same thing on social media where parents and grandparents were able to see children performing math and reading in their classroom in real time?  Nightmare, right?  It surely can be.

So here I am, one day into break, having had the opportunity to sleep, shop, wrap presents and clean the apartment.  A full day but not a stressful day.  It will take a couple of days to shake off yesterday, typical when I’m not really happy with my work.  It was like that for the program on Monday too.  Not happy because I could have been better and if I had been better my kids would have been better.  My wonderful husband tells me that it feels that way because I care too much.  It’s the epitome of a music educator, always striving for the very best you can be and therefore modeling for your students to be the best they can be.

Fifteen more days of break to go.  Fifteen days to recuperate and be ready to hop back into the craziness that is teaching music.  Fifteen days to get my head back together to begin a new semester, new music and improving on what I did this past semester.  That’s the redemption of teaching – there’s always a new day to make things better.  But in the meantime, the feet are up, the throw is across my lap and it’s past my bedtime.  Day 1 of break is in the books.